Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Philadelphia and the privatization of a school system | Seattle Education

Philadelphia and the privatization of a school system | Seattle Education:


Philadelphia and the privatization of a school system

We first made note of what was going on within the Philadelphia school system last year with the post Who Will Run Philadelphia’s Schools? Bill Gates?
Then in the Weekly Update : The Philadelphia horror story this month, I described how the schools in Philadelphia were to be privatized by closing neighborhood schools and populating the urban landscape  with charter chains. This wringing of hands over the economy and finding that enough of a reason to close public schools and replace them with the corporate vision of sanitized and privatized education has become the model for the takeover of our school systems starting in New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina and continuing on to Chicago and New York. For more on that subject, read the introduction to the Shock Doctrine by Naomi KleinBlank is Beautiful: Three Decades of Erasing and Remaking the World.
To follow is a portion of an article written by Ellen Brown, titled The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Quiet Drama in Philadelphia.  Ms. Brown not only writes about the devastation wrought by closing neighborhood schools but also offers one solution of many in terms of providing greater financial power to states, cities and communities.

“You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.
You will not be able to skip out for beer during commercials,
Because the revolution will not be televised,
The revolution will be live.”
- song by Gil Scott-Heron
Last week, the city of Philadelphia’s